What She Did
by outside the crayon box
Summary: How You Can't Just Survive/"A Truth Once Not Spoken Is Forever A Lie"


She knows, and that's the worst part. She pretended to everyone in the hospital that she couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't remember. But she's home now, and what she can recall hits her at full force.

She can no longer act like she doesn't know; she has no reason to. She needs to admit to herself what she did, only she can't.

And she hears the front door open downstairs, a simple shout ("Honey! I'm ho-ome!"), and it makes her cry because that's what she said, that's what she told him, those were the last words she spoke before the incident. And now she's afraid she might never speak again.

Not because she can't. But because she has a horrible secret, and she's afraid that it will spill out if she opens her mouth.

* * *

All night long, her phone beeps at her, it's incessant noise making her sick to her stomach, so she eventually stumbles off of her bed and drags her feet toward her bureau, where, in one motion, she grabs the device and hurls it across the room as hard as she can, relishing the sound of breaking glass, and she doesn't even notice when her bare feet are pierced by the shards.

Blood spills over her cotton sheets, but she doesn't care. In fact, she takes pleasure in the small red dots that steadily drip-drip from her feet down to the blankets - she watches, mesmerized, as they fall, the only constant thing in her life.

She stares for hours, even after the flow of blood has long since subsided, and she looks intently at nothing, nothing at all, and she feels everything spinning away.

And she dreams. She dreams of that fateful night, weeks ago, but she's been in a coma for so long she can't quite think of the exact date. Or maybe she does know, but the brain has a weird way of sweeping that kind of information under the rug, and it's not like she wants to remember anyway.

She just lets herself fade away.

* * *

_"Honey! I'm ho-ome!" she shouts, smiling as the love of her life, the one and only Derrick James Harrington, enters the room and plants a kiss on her glossy lips._

_"I think a romantic date is due," he teases with a grin._

_She brushes his shaggy hair off his forehead and nods in agreement._

_She helps to pack the picnic basket, knowing where they're going: the summit of Yorktown Peak, the highest hill in the area, the only place she really feels that she can touch the stars, more than touch, hold on and never let go. Without thinking, she climbs in her Porsche, her birthday present from Derrick more than two years ago. They're coasting down the highway, which is, for once, peaceful, and she thinks, _Wow. What an omen_, only she doesn't know what kind until she sees the girl at the side of the road, and pulls over so as to avoid hitting her. Derrick climbs out._

_"Do you need help?" he asks kindly. _

_She turns her face to meet his, and she sees who it is, the girl who used to be her best friend, the girl who used to mean the world to her, the girl that once upon a time she would have moved heaven and earth for. But times have changed._

_Yet when she insists she does need help, and could he pretty please take her home, he offers her the backseat, not giving a thought to her feelings._

_Her feet feel numb as she maneuvers the car back onto the road. She fumbles over the brakes, and hits the gas too hard, so as to send them speeding up the street. _

_"What are you doing?" he asks, looking worried, but it's not until she doesn't respond that panic sets in. "What are you doing?" he repeats, trying to grab the wheel. "What are you doing?"_

_And with a gleeful grin, she spins away from him, and the car, her precious (only not so much anymore) Porsche, goes sprawling down the embankment on the side of Route 22, and she lets herself go._

* * *

She wakes up sweating but freezing.

She never told all those doctors and nurses that she could hear what they were saying about her, wondering why she didn't wake up when all their tests proclaimed she should. She never told them that she saw their worried faces. And she had never, _would_ never say that she could recall what had happened, because she killed the girl, it was all her fault. She killed the girl, she killed her husband, and now she is back at square 1, in her own room, in her old house.

And she knows her life will never be the same.

After all, you know what they say: _A truth once not spoken is forever a lie._


End file.
